The Massachusetts State Police Commonwealth Fusion Center (CFC) believes that cyber actors may use the current bank failures for future phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks. Cyber actors often use current events to mask their phishing campaigns to seem more believable and relevant. As everyone now knows, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) became one of the largest banks to fail since the 2008 financial crisis. More recently, First Republic Bank also failed. … More
Tag Archives: attack
Kaseya VSA Cyberattack: What Kaseya and the Feds Are Saying
If you aren’t following the ransomware attack on Kaseya’s VSA product and approximately 800-1500 of its users, you should be. Like many cyberattacks, this one came on the verge of a holiday weekend. As the company itself notes, “Kaseya’s VSA product has unfortunately been the victim of a sophisticated cyberattack. Due to our teams’ fast response, we believe that this has been localized to a very small number of on-premises customers only. … More
Hacker Fails to Establish “Necessity” of DDOS Attack on Hospital
In a recent decision from the District of Massachusetts, the alleged perpetrator of cyber-attacks against Wayside Youth and Family Support Network and Boston Children’s Hospital (“BCH”) failed in his attempt to assert a novel defense: necessity. In what most would view as a positive development, the court found that the defendant and alleged hacker did not “offer[] competent evidence that it was objectively reasonable to anticipate a causal relationship between the alleged cyber attack and the purported harm to be averted.”… More
Ransomware Update: The FBI Weighs In
The FBI recently released an article discussing the spate of ransomware attacks on a variety of different entities, including hospitals. In the article, the FBI warned that ransomware attacks and the cybercriminals carrying them out are growing increasingly sophisticated. The FBI opposes paying a ransom when hit by a ransomware attack, saying that doing do incentivizes more ransomware attacks, can inadvertently fund other illegal activity, and does not always result in the restoration of access. … More
New Credit Card Security Doesn’t Go Far Enough
By Martha Coakley and Jon Hurst
This entry originally ran as an op-ed in the September 25, 2015 edition of The Boston Globe.
Hardly a week goes by without a news report of a new cyberattack. As any consumer affected by fraud knows, the harm is real. The impact on businesses, government, and other targets is also real,… More
If You Got a New Smartphone Over The Holidays, Here Are Some Security Issues to Think About
If you got a new smartphone over the holidays, you’ve probably figured out how to use it by now. The next thing to worry about is security. The good news is that wireless providers are working to fortify their phones against attacks, as explained in this Wall Street Journal article.
There are some personal actions you should consider as well:
- Set a password and make it a strong one.…